JPEG or TIFF? Choosing the right file format for scanned photographs
One is universally readable, the other is what archives use. Here's the honest difference and when it's worth paying for both.
5 min read
Every digitisation quote eventually asks you to pick a file format, and most people pick whichever word they recognise. The distinction matters more than it sounds.
JPEG: the everyday format
JPEG compresses the image to keep file sizes small. That compression is lossy — a little detail is permanently discarded — but at high quality settings the loss is invisible on screen or in print at normal sizes. JPEGs open on every phone, TV, and photo frame ever made, which is why they're the sensible default for sharing with family.
TIFF: the preservation format
TIFF stores the scan without discarding anything. Files are typically eight to fifteen times larger, but they survive repeated editing, heavy restoration work, and large-format printing without degrading. National archives store TIFF for exactly this reason.
The practical answer for most families
Take JPEGs for the whole collection and TIFFs for the couple of hundred images that genuinely matter — the wedding, the earliest surviving portraits, anything you might one day print large or have restored. Paying for TIFF across two thousand holiday snaps is money spent on storage rather than on quality you'll ever see.
A note on DPI
Resolution matters more than format. A 300 dpi TIFF of a small print holds less real detail than a 600 dpi JPEG of the same print. We scan photographs at high resolution as standard so the format choice is about longevity, not sharpness.
Trusted with family archives
Umberdosh Restoration
We digitise family collections by hand from a home studio in Cambridgeshire — archival-grade scans, originals returned tracked and insured, and a fixed rate card so you know exactly what you're paying for.
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